Alex Balk

This is a straight-up excerpt/gallery, so really the only thing I had to do with it was the headline. Which is admittedly lame, but you can never have enough Wallace Stevens allusions when you’re talking douchebags.

I give Cho a lot of shit.

No apologies, just a statement of fact. And all of it’s deserved. But I do have to say that this bear rub remix is pretty damn gangster. (Note: This is how Cho speaks. All the time. In professional meetings. Kids today.)

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post suggested that David Cho drops his r’s when co-opting African-American patois; Mr. Cho points out that he does in fact pronounce them. Alexbalk.tumblr.com regrets the error.

An Extremely Brief History Of Blog Feuds

File under things which took three hours to boldface.

Identity Politics

I was always deeply amused when Gawker commenters would accuse me of being wacky performance artist Newtojezebel. And also touched! The idea that, along with every other part of my portfolio, I was able to accomplish the Herculean task of writing endless semi-deranged monologues for two different sites gave me a level of credit for industry which there are simply not enough amphetamines in this world to achieve. Anyway, I recently received a fax from her; I think it finally puts those rumors to rest, don’t you? I’m too busy being Fake Nick Denton to do anything else these days.

marklisanti:

“Suddenly, a dying David Crosby appears and with his last breath warns Oates of a mysterious secret group of mustache wearers bent on killing other mustache wearers. As actor Tom Selleck attempts to escape from the latest murder scene, Oates summons his own mustache with a fist pump that simultaneously changes his clothes from conservative attire to pink pants and white boots.”

Oates, Mustache Make Cartoon Crime-Fighting Team

[via bullshit]

I still don’t get it, but I do kind of love it.

The fun never stops.

Our features editor is on vacation this week. I just forwarded something to her and the auto-generator kicked this back:

I’ll be out of the office until Monday, July 7. In the meantime, please send any queries, no matter how petty and inconsequential, to Alex Balk.

Thanks,
Paige

On the plus side, it does show a keen understanding of what my job is actually like.

When the clip jockeys from Red Lasso describe something as MUST-SEE, well, you’ve got to take it under advisement. Anyway… there’ll always be an England? We guess?

And now it's a place where old ladies do Pilates.

I live around the corner from this, and I’ve always wondered.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Milestones of any sort always seem ridiculously arbitrary; the idea that we’re going to give special weight to some moment of personal import because it’s been x number of rotations round the sun since we first did it strikes me as kind of laughable. Still, it’s the only common metric we’ve got, so what the hell. It was on a July 1st much like this one that I started my stint at Gawker… back in 2006. Yes, two years ago. That’s it. WHAT THE FUCK? It’s like Rip Van Winkle except they kept me awake the whole time. And prodded me with needles and torches. I mean, holy crap, it’s a good thing I did nothing with my life for the other 30-odd years, because between Gawker and Radar, I should look and feel like a slightly less sprightly Wilford Brimley. Which I do. Anyway, happy anniversary to me. Another year like this and I’ll be in a box.

We're not gonna turn into Advocate's Corner

but read this.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The first real album I became aware of was Billy Joel’s The Stranger. I remember listening to it in the backyard of the old house down in south Jersey. My dad owned it on 8-track, and, owing to the vagaries of 8-track, this song had to be split into two parts, so even today when I hear it I’m still somehow surprised when it fails to fade out and fade in again. Anyway: Enterprising magazine editors, I have a free idea! Sony is re-releasing the album for its 30th anniversary. That means there are thousands of couples across America who got married 30 years ago with “Just the Way You Are” as their wedding theme. Someone (obviously, we don’t have the resources and it’s not exactly a Radar story anyway, but maybe a People-type organization) should track down about 100 of these couples and see where they are today. How many of these folks, now in their fifties, are still married? How many split up? It’s the perfect package of how we saw wedded bliss back at the meandering end of the seventies and what it looks like in America now. Or not. Anyway, it’s all yours.

Oh, also? Five-year-old me thought there was a character in this song named “Brenda Renetti.” Which means that even then there were too many Italians in my life.

Somebody from City Paper:

So I spent the weekend getting all worked up about the Lara Logan sex scandal. (Briefly: Newly promoted CBS national security correspondent had some romance in Iraq, with more than one man, gasp. One of the men was in the middle of a divorce, which started before their fling, but that didn’t seem to matter.) It completely eludes me how it’s at all newsworthy to write about the sex life of a reporter on assignment overseas. Would we ever read these stories about a male correspondent?

No. No we would not.

Because I live my life in a constant state of stress and sleeplessness and I’m almost aggressively against doing anything that might improve or even stabilize my general wellbeing, this weekend found me visited by the Sweet Christmothering Cunt of All Summer Colds, which carries bonus features of fever, chills, and aching! A smarter individual than I would admit defeat and stay huddled under the covers for the rest of the day, but next week I’m actually taking my first real vacation since starting at Radar nine months ago, so I can’t let Cechin realize just how bad it’s going to be when he’s by himself until I’m on the plane and there’s nothing he can do about it. So I dragged my sweaty, cursing self into the office today and got down to the dirty business of manufacturing content for our regular rotation. Of course, I was under pressure and a little loopy from the variety of medicines I crammed down my throat in a no doubt fruitless effort at recovery. Anyway, that’s how something like this happens. Sorry.